Ten years ago, more or less to the day, I wrote the following on the then Signs of the Times page:

"As I sit here, a motion in the UK House of commons has been defeated by some 415 votes to 149. Not that any other result would have stopped the US, yet it signifies a full green light for the attack on Iraq. Bush's 'ultimatum' to Saddam expires at midnight (GMT) Thursday (7pm EST). "Shock and Awe" (read "death and destruction") may come at any time between now and then. We have at most one day, one day left to ponder at the edge of the abyss before the coming darkness engulfs us all.

As if to mock those who are against this illegal invasion and the lies and deceit that have been used to justify it, Ari Fleishcer today stated that, even if Saddam went into exile now, the US would still invade. It's not about WMD, it's about domination and the destructive principle. Perhaps Ari feels he can be more truthful now that it is a 'done deal', now that Cheney, Rumsfeld and Blair have told the peace-loving people of the world to go f**k themselves. It must have been hard for Fleischer to stand up in front of the world's media every day and lie so profusely. (Then again, maybe not).

It's hard for me to describe the feelings I have right now; there is an enormous sense of impending doom, mixed with anger at being made to feel so helpless in the face of such rampant psychopathy. Who are these men that they can simply decide to throw the world and its inhabitants into "war without end", and who are we that they could, for so long, fool us with such pathetic and barely-disguised lies and know that we would just roll over and let them get away with it?"

Ten years ago today, the US and British military (with a posse of cowed 'allies' in tow) launched 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' aka 'Shock and Awe' aka, 'Operation Destroy the Critical Infrastructure of Iraq and Initiate an Overt Decade-long Attack on - and Occupation of - the Iraqi People.' To date, at least 1.5 million Iraqi civilians have been murdered, and at least 5 million displaced from their homes as a direct result of 'liberation'. This on top of millions killed and impoverished by US-led economic sanctions in the preceding decade. Deadly car bombings continue to this day. Suffice to say, Iraq was not liberated: it was destroyed, and destroyed deliberately.

Last week, the UK Guardian newspaper published the results of a 15-month investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic. Euphemistically titled 'James Steele: America's mystery man in Iraq', the video report presents fairly damning evidence that, in the immediate aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq, the US Govt. and military began to assemble a 10,000 strong 'Shia militia' that, under US command, would be used to do three things:

Kidnap, torture, murder and maim members of the Iraq resistance and those members of the Iraqi population that supported them.

Plants bombs that targeted predominantly Sunni and Shia areas in an effort to divide the population and thereby any unified resistance to the US occupation.

Create the impression of a 'civil war' in Iraq that could be used by the US and European governments and militaries to justify the continued occupation of Iraq for 'peace-keeping' purposes.

James Steele, Cheney and Rumsfeld’s ‘Mr. death-squad’ in Iraq.

While the 50 minute documentary is proof enough that Rumsfeld, Cheney, General Petraeus, and all the other NeoCon warhawks and CIA monsters consciously employed the services of former US Army Colonel James Steele in the organisation of death squads against the Iraqi grass-roots resistance (a tactic that he, Steele, had used against resistance movements in South America in the 1970s and 90′s), it panders to the official narrative that 'sectarianism' in Iraq was the root cause of the carnage that unfolded.

The so-called 'Shia militia' used by the American government (with the help and advice of British and Israeli counter-insurgency 'experts') were recruited directly by the CIA and people like James Steele to carry out extra-judicial murders of anyone they could loosely identify as 'resistance'. In order to cloak this strategy, indiscriminate attacks on Iraqi civilians, Shia and Sunni alike, were carried out on a massive scale. Some of these individuals, in another setting, would be called 'al-Qaeda'. Their usefulness in the employ of US warhawks in the Pentagon was doubly valuable because they both justified continued US occupation and provided 'proof' for the American War on Terror mythology, ex post facto, that the US was at war with the perpetrators of 9/11.

Whereas before the invasion in 2003 there was absolutely nothing to link 9/11 to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the creation of death squads (real) labelled 'al Qaeda in Iraq' (fictitious) 'made real' the lie that America and all Western civilization was at war against hordes of irrational and violent Muslims, and became the template for instigating terrorism to suppress popular uprisings in Yemen, Mali and elsewhere. Once they have people violent, they can wear down and manage the national popular resistance, ensuring no opposition to the real strategic objectives (namely the control of Middle Eastern oil). The US forces of occupation, along with their British counterparts, had long experience in what actually happens when you militarily invade and occupy a sovereign nation: the people resist, and not just one ethnic or religious group, but more or less the whole population. There is nothing quite like a foreign occupation for uniting a country.

The British pursued this policy in Northern Ireland. First they sought the 'Criminalisation' of the conflict (presenting all resistance as 'terrorists') and then the 'Ulsterisation' of the conflict, which sought to create the impression among the wider British and world public that the struggle in Northern Ireland was an internal 'sectarian conflict', with the British playing the role of the frustrated 'peace-keepers'. Both strategies were outlined in an unpublished 1975 British strategy paper titled 'The Way Ahead'. As part of the effort to create the reality of a 'civil war', death squads were used to attack civilians from both communities (Catholic and Protestant).

In Iraq, these US-controlled 'Shia' death squads have been operating in much the same way, and while the media is content to portray them as ordinary Shias motivated by religious bias, they are in fact hired thugs who value only the money they are paid by their US masters and the promise of positions of power in a future Iraqi government. Like the rank and file of the 'Libyan rebels' and the 'Free Syrian Army', these people form the dregs of Arab and Middle Eastern societies. Led by spellbinders who veil their barbaric actions with religious prose, secular leaders in the region, like Ghaddafi and Assad, and Nasser and Arafat before them, struggled in vain to keep them at bay. The reason for this is because the US, Britain, France and Israel have consistently supported - in the form of weapons, money, training and blatant lies - the extremists against the rational voices.

Throughout the US occupation of Iraq, the main representative of Shias in Iraq, Muqtada al-Sadr, has repeatedly called for unity among Shia and Sunni Iraqis in the face of foreign occupation and deception in the form of efforts to divide the resistance. These efforts included the bombing of bridges in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities in an effort to prevent communication between Iraqis, the use of widespread terror tactics to force Sunni and Shia Iraqis to flee their homes, and the bombing of religious shrines, either Shia or Sunni, in an effort to create the reality of 'sectarian strife'.

Iraq today is in ruins. The country has been ripped apart socially, mainly by way of the literal ripping apart of tens of thousands of civilians, with many being first brutally and systematically tortured by US-sponsored death squads. Hundreds of thousands more have been summarily murdered, either by the bombs of US aircraft, the bullets of US soldiers, or those ubiquitous and very effective 'car bombs' planted by US and British operatives and their hired thugs.

'Operation Iraqi Freedom' brought death and destruction to an entire country of 26 million people. It is among the world's worst crimes against humanity and it was deliberately and meticulously planned that way.

Reader Comments

As in Africa the British did the old divide & conquer in the mid east long before America arrived to further divide & conquer. The colonial European powers were masterful at putting minority groups in charge of their previous exploits. Old game, new players! I remember walking into work the day we ( America ) invaded Iraq and being absolutely livid and being in the minority at that. I argued with my right leaning boss of the lies fed to us on a platter to no avail. A close friend of mine said " look at the overtime we are gonna get from this" and yet another said " It's over there, why should you care" My wife also felt that we were justified in our attack of Iraq. ( She has changed her mind in the wake of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary).
The fear factor worked then and is working better every day. Whenever America starts to crack its collective eye open to the reality that we are being lied to on a massive scale, the PTB puts the FEAR FACTOR into overdrive. Whether it be a school shootings, a massive drop in the DOW or some other manufactured lie, they have gotten very good at in the past 12 years or so. The bigger the lie the more believable, an old German trick from the 3rd Reich I believe. We are in trying times INDEED! Keep your eyes and ears wide open!

We were left scratching our heads and wondering how the Iraqi's were involved with Osama Bin Laden ( whom we have since learned had nothing to do with it either ) in the attacks on the twin towers. The United Nations inspectors said the Iraqi had no weapons of mass destruction. So exactly why were we attacking Iraq seven months after 9-11? Oh, I must have forgotten...because we could. The thing I personally hate the most about it is although I don't pay much tax, I am complicit in this nightmare as a U.S. taxpayer. I am trying to break that chain, without moving in under the nearest bridge.

Project for a 21st Century America called for the destruction of Iraq, among other, and to take the resources of the oil region. The UN inspector who saw no WMDs was ridiculed by the administration and the media. The "attacks" of 9/11, also called for as the New Pearl Harbor, stampeded the public into perpetual wars and the Patriot act gave the administration the means to totalitarianism. Any facts to the contrary were all dismissed if these goals would be compromised.

For those who might not recall, Basra was part of the UK's "territory" in Iraq, and two of their spec op boys killed two policement, as they were en route to a religious festival, dressed as Arabs driving a car with explosives. They got arrested, not killed, and put in a jail that OUR soldiers had died trying to fill.

When Iraq wouldn't release them, but did release their pics, something had to be done, so they attacked the jail with tanks/apcs and helicopter gunships, blowing a hole in it, to capture back their false flag "suicide" bomb creators. This of course allowed other prisoners to escape too. I wonder how many American boys - and girls - were killed trying to fill that jail with what those kids were told were "terrorists." And all only to have US/UK tanks and gunships blow a hole in the side of the jail to get out their two "false flag operatives."

Joe wrote about this in "Flaming APCs! Now There's a Heart-Warming Story! Just Don't Mention The False Flag" at [Link]
That's just one time they got caught. I'm certain they didn't get caught 100 times (at least) to match just that one.

This story never lingered in the MSM, no doubt because it illustrates yet another example of the Wests use of false flags to perpetuate its lies concerning " Arab terrorism"

......[Link]
Here's a photo of the two Brit SAS operatives after they were caught, but before they were "rescued" by their handlers.......[Link]
Interestingly, there was Captain Ken Masters, the British chief police investigator in Basra who was responsible for investigating the circumstances of the arrest of two undercover elite SAS men, wearing Arab clothing, by Iraqi police in Basra. Well, he died under mysterious circumstances. The cause of death was not mentioned. According to a Ministry of Defense spokesman, his death was “not due to hostile action” nor to natural causes.